Introduction

What You’ll Learn
In this lesson you’ll learn how to create an Instagram marketing system that saves you time, increases engagement, and gets you more followers.

Why It’s Important
More followers typically means more leads and more leads means more clients. If, like me, you mainly use Instagram for business, automation is essential.

---

I’d like to start off by saying that some of the strategies in this system sit within a moral grey area for me. Things like following and then unfollowing isn’t my cup of tea.

But test after test shows that following to get more followers and unfollowing those who don’t follow you back keeps your profile and engagement up.

Unfollowing people who don’t follow you back is like cleaning out your list of email subscribers who are no longer interested in your emails.

It's a win win for everyone. They aren't interested in your content and your follow/engagement ratio stays high, which in turn helps you reach more people who are interested in your content.

So yeah, it’s not perfect but it works without hurting anyone. And that’s OK in my book.

Optimize Your Profile

The first thing we need to look at for our system is your Instagram profile. While it’s nothing to do with the system itself, when you system is in place, your profile will be how you move people away from instagram on a platform where they can become a lead.

This is done by adding a link to your profile.

We tested various methods of linking from a profile including links to the site, links lead magnet and even apps like LinkTree that enable you to create a list of resources.

When it came down to it, we had one goal. Move people from Instagram to our email list so we went with a link to our most popular lead magnet, The Ultimate Guide to Business systems.

Note: An actual link instead of shortened link seems to work better. Possibly something to do with being able to see where you're headed.

We also use hashtags in our description. This has shown a minimal increase in engagement.

Your Content

It seems looks are everything on Instagram. We toyed around with lots of ideas and as it turns out, people on IG love good looking at well designed images and great content.

In fact, a switch to branded images and more engaging content not inly increase engagement but increased our daily follow count.

I’d highly recommend jumping on Canva.com and creating yourself a branded template. Add all of your images to this template and upload them to a scheduling software like Recurpost.

How to Follow

We use a piece of software called Stim Social to follow as many new people as possible per day from competitor accounts and hash tags. We do this by looking at our competitors list of followers and following them.

We also use the search function to like and follow accounts that use certain hashtags.

Once we hit around 3,000 additional follows, which takes a few days, we'll start to unfollow anyone who didn’t follow back. There’s are desktop and mobile apps to help you do this.

Unfollowing

The Stim Social software enables us to unfollow people who either never followed back (weren’t interested in our content) or people who's content we wouldn't engage with.

Using the app, you can sort the people who haven’t followed you back by how recently they followed you so we could be sure we weren’t unfollowing anyone we’d just followed.

Engaging

Engagement is the only part of this system that can’t be systemised. It was also the part I didn’t feel comfortable about automating.

I can’t stand those comments you get that say “great” or they’re just a pointless emoji. It’s clear some people are using bots to do this and that’s where I drew the line.

We use the search feature to find relevant hashtags and then liked dozens of posts and comment on at least 20 posts per day from the timeline.

The comments we leave are generally meaningful and relevant to the post. They clearly show we actually read whatever the person said or acknowledged what was in the image.

Messaging

We're still testing this but we currently send a message to new followers letting them know we have a free guide for them.

Now, I’m not a fan of automated messages so I asked our Facebook group of trainers and reached out to new followers on Instagram to see how they feel about auto direct messages. Turns out most aren’t that bothered.

So, using the Stim Social app, we auto messaged people who follow us. Most of whom we can assume are personal trainers.

Sure, I imagine some people aren’t big fans of it but for a marketing medium that was getting us zero leads before is now getting us lots of leads.

Consistency

The last step in the system is consistency. I found that if we drop off or don't keep it up for whatever reason, engagement drops big time and it takes a while to creep back up. It's basically a digital prison. But it does bring in a lot of new leads. Currently around 120 per month.

Which isn’t bad when you consider we’ve only been using it seriously for 4 months at the time of writing this.

The System

With all of the above in mind, here's a simple system to follow:

1. Post quality branded content at least once per day
   
2. Follow as many new profiles as possible per day (Stim Social automates this)
3. Unfollow people who don't follow you back after 3 days (Stim Social automates this)
4. Engage with your current followers daily (Stim Social automates this)
5. Comment on at least 20 posts by non followers per day
6. Message new followers (option but again, Stim Social automates this)
7. Keep it up.

That's it. It takes some time but it does work in terms of getting new leads, increasing the size of your audience and getting new client.

---

Previous LEsson

Next Lesson

---